Excel v16 Users - Does autosave really not work?

[tuqqer]

I have a standalone version of Excel (16.49) and was working all day on an open Excel spreadsheet, adding things throughout the day. I stopped working around 6pm and just let everything along for 5 hours until 11, when I came in to shut down the Mac. I did the shutdown really fast, and as the Mac was closing down apps, Excel came up and asked if I wanted to Save anything. I presumed, since I hadn't made any changes for 5 hours to any open docs, that there was nothing to save, so I automatically just said no.

I wake this morning, open up that doc, and no changes from yesterday were saved. I then thought no worries, I'll go into Time Machine and get the backed up version from around 5pm. TM did its thing, and same deal: absolutely no changes were saved from yesterday.

All my files live on my hard drive, same drive that all my apps are on. I'm not saving to iCloud, or using a different drive than the one the OS is on. All basic behavior.

IS there an autosave feature on Excel v16 standalone? Was this SOP and there is, in fact, no autosave? I looked around in the settings and aside from 3 already checked boxes in the Preference Save tab (none which looked related to autosave).

[Gareth]

There's some terminology to clear up and this article might shed some light: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/offi...038402ff02

In a nutshell, that's correct. There's no "AutoSave" in standalone Excel. AutoSave is a cloud feature for 365 users (i.e. it will only AutoSave to the cloud, not your computer's local drive), and it still needs to be enabled on a document basis (there's a toggle switch for it in the top bar of the document).

What you do have is "AutoRecover" which saves temp files in the event of a crash or unexpected shutdown, however, these files are deleted every time you save (and were likely also deleted when you chose not to save, since that was still a controlled closing of the application).

[tuqqer]

Thank you, Gareth. I will definitely get back into the Command-S habit with this app from now on.

[Gareth]

Yea, I can see where this might cause confusion between Apple (and other) apps which have implemented the MacOS "autosave" feature and third-party apps where that isn't implemented. I spend so little time in apps that support Apple's autosave, that I'm frequently confused when I do use them (i.e. Preview). Especially the loss of "Save As" as I end up making duplicates of documents I didn't mean to.